Sheep

THE BEST DAY TO MAIL

Don’t act like a sheep yourself but do make sure your customers act like them.

I came across some research recently that proved to me once again that most marketing people rarely think for themselves, but follow one another like sheep. Morgan Stewart, a guy at ExactTarget (http://email.exacttarget.com), clearly knows what he talks about on the subject of Email messaging and states that the day or time at which you send an Email message can have a real impact on response rates.

It’s the same with direct mail, except you can never be exactly sure how long your message will take to reach your prospect, whereas with Email you simply click your mouse and the message disappears into the ether for instantaneous delivery.

Apparently, about a year ago, conventional wisdom was that the best day to send an Email was Tuesday. Then someone did some research that showed that deliverability rates were best for mail sent on a Monday. Clearly this research was highly read and acted upon. Then ExactTarget conducted its own research on the topic, analysing twelve months of historical data, 2,000 organizations, 160,000 email campaigns and 800 million Email messages, making it the largest amount of data ever analysed in a study on this topic. This showed that the best day for sending an Email had shifted to Wednesday, Thursday or Friday; indicating to me that all the sheep were now mailing on a Monday, cluttering up peoples inboxes and not having their messages read.

In case you’re interested in this, apparently Sunday and Saturday yield the highest click through rates, since with less competition in the inbox during weekends, people who open your email have more time to read and respond to your message.

Results by industry vary. High tech companies fare well on Fridays, membership organizations on Wednesdays and online retailers drive twice the click¬through rates when sending on Sunday.

Don't be a sheep - TEST, TEST, TEST!!!

Please do not follow these results blindly like sheep. One of the greatest things about the internet is the ability to test ideas and get results back almost instantly, so that you can analyse your data and repeat your successes on a larger scale. With direct mail testing months can go by between setting up a test matrix and getting sufficient replies and orders through to find out what works best.

But there’s more to it than that. In the world of CRM, you should know which day of the week and hour of the day EACH customer is most likely to respond to your message. If you do you’ll be sending mail constantly through the week which actually makes the whole process of dealing with replies and orders somewhat easier since they all don’t arrive simultaneously.

Of course, if you don’t have precise data on every customer, do some analytics and clone the data to match the customer. And if you don’t recognise the sheep in the accompanying photo, it’s Dolly the clone!